All posts tagged california

The internet is abuzz today over California’s Monterey Shale – and a news article that says the federal government will soon slash its estimate of how much crude oil drillers can extract from the region, which has been touted as the biggest potential oilfield in the country.

Here’s what is happening – and what matters.

The Los Angeles Times reports the Energy Information Administration will soon lower its estimate of how much oil can be recovered from the Monterey Shale. A couple years ago, the government estimated there were 13.7 billion barrels underneath California. The new figure? Six hundred million barrels, according to the article. An EIA spokesman confirmed the change, attributing it to “new geology information…and a lack of production growth relative to other shale plays.”

Does that mean the oil has disappeared? Not at all. The 600 million barrel figure is the government’s estimate of how much oil drillers can get out of the earth with existing technology and at current prices. And based on the handful of wells that have been drilled, the Monterey is proving to be tough for energy companies to tap. More on this after the jump… Read More »

Millions of pills go unused in household medicine cabinets – often long past expiration dates – and now some California lawmakers think drug makers should pay to get rid of them. A new bill to create a ‘take-back’ program is pending in the California legislature. If passed, the state would become the first to adopt such a measure and proponents hope the idea will gain traction elsewhere.

The move, which has drug makers on edge, reflects growing frustration among California officials worried about drinking water and contamination from medicines flushed down the toilet or drug abuse from stockpiled painkillers. They say disposal costs can overwhelm local governments, which are starting to turn to the pharmaceutical industry to underwrite these programs.

“It’s long overdue for the pharmaceutical companies to accept responsibility,” says California state senator Hannah-Beth Jackson, who introduced the bill. More on this after the jump… Read More »

Tesoro Corp. shares took a drubbing on Thursday, falling nearly 5%, after the refiner said its fourth-quarter profit margin on fuel sales tanked 64%.

The San Antonio-based company mostly operates refineries and gas stations on the West Coast. In December, California experienced a short, strange market blip that forced Tesoro to buy expensive fuel wholesale and then sell it at retail gas stations for less than it paid, Chief Executive Greg Goff told investors Thursday.

Earlier in the quarter, the company had to shut down its Los Angeles refinery for maintenance, just as regional profit margins improved, he said. Read More »

It’s Model S sedan is the best selling car of any sort in eight of the top 25 wealthiest zip codes in the U.S. for the first eight months of the year, and every one of the zip codes is in California, according to a study by car researching outfit Edmunds.com. Edmunds used its own data, as well as R.L. Polk & Co. registration data and a study by Forbes of the wealthiest zip codes by real estate values.

The electric Model S accounted for 15.4% of all new cars registered to people living in Atherton, Calif., where the median home price is $6.67 million. The zip code is next to Palo Alto, where Tesla has its headquarters.

That’s an astounding market share for any single vehicle — for comparison, Ford’s F-series pickup truck is the top selling vehicle in the U.S. this year, and has 4.7% of the national market according to Autodata Corp.

After Oxy reported a 15% increase in third quarter net income thanks to higher production and commodity prices, Chief Executive Steve Chazen told analysts the Los Angeles-based company’s California business might be broken out during future restructuring.

Electric cars are tiny slice of the overall U.S. market, but there are certain metropolitan areas where plug-in cars are popular. ChargePoint, a company that sells electric vehicle charging stations, has rolled out a map of the top 10 electric car hotspots that contains one or two surprises.

ChargePoint says it developed its ranking of electric car-friendly metros starting with the number of registered electric vehicles, weighted those numbers according to the population for each metropolitan area and then factored in the number of public charging stations, also weighted by population.

The statistical method puts the San Francisco Bay area – home to electric luxury car pioneer Tesla Motors Inc. – in the No. 1 spot, even though Los Angeles has a larger population of registered plug-in cars (17,101 compared to San Francisco’s 14,879, according to R.L. Polk & Co. data supplied by ChargePoint.)

It’s not very often that the actions of a single company register in national economic statistics, but Facebook Inc.’s 2012 initial public offering appears to have hit the mark.

The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics last week reported that the average weekly wage in San Mateo County, California in the fourth quarter of 2012 rose an astounding 107% from a year earlier, to $3,240. That’s the equivalent of $168,000 a year, and more than more than 50% higher than the next highest county, New York County (better known as Manhattan), which came in at $2,107 a week, or roughly $110,000 a year.

What’s behind the numbers? The labor department doesn’t discuss specific employers, but several clues point to Facebook, which is based in Menlo Park, Calif., part of San Mateo County.

But for a more practical picture of how the company is hitting the big leagues, consider these first-quarter sales numbers from the California New Car Dealers Association. In California — the biggest economy in America and the 12th largest in the world — the Tesla Model S was the third best-selling luxury car of the first three months of 2013, with a 12.7% share of the market.